‘I like that film,’ says Roitfeld, somewhat mischievously in her Clouseau-esque English when we meet in the fashionable London hotel where she’s staying. It’s in a part of Clerkenwell that looks just like midtown Manhattan. Perhaps this similarity makes for ease of transition when Roitfeld, now 67, visits her daughter Julia and grandchildren Romy and George, who live in London, and her son Vladimir, who lives in New York. ‘It was funny, non? The Devil Wears Prada. And I like Anna. Well, maybe not like exactly. But I respect her. And she’s a good mother.’
In the end, it was Roitfeld who, four years later, left her job (jumped or was pushed? It depends which party you talk to), and Wintour who triumphed über alles, more powerful in 2022 than ever.
Such are the vicissitudes of the fashion world, with more undulations than the black leather Alaïa bustier Roitfeld is wearing today (over a black sweater and trousers from Rick Owens – conventional granny style, this is not).
Fashion’s slings and arrows are all the more lacerating because while the industry is globally valued at around $1.6 trillion, its inner court is a tiny circle of figures and their position on the Fashion Index is publicly displayed every season at the fashion shows, thanks to the notorious caste system of seating. One season, the Front Row. The next, Siberia.
Roitfeld wasn’t even in Siberia following her Vogue departure in 2011. ‘They [by whom she can only mean Condé Nast, Vogue’s publishers] said I was forbidden to attend them the first season,’ she tells me in her sweet, flutey voice.
She’s made up for the lacuna now. A magazine, beauty lines, collections for the high street – and her own self-funded perfume launch, which is why she’s in London today.
Interestingly, for someone who is often described as shy, what she most enjoyed at French Vogue, she says, were the two parties she threw that bookended her time there. ‘I remember at the launch, I was introducing Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana to Tom Ford and to Miuccia Prada and John Galliano… everyone came. That wouldn’t happen now.’ She loved being a conduit for power. Later, at another party she threw, she introduced Charlotte Tilbury to Tom Ford. ‘And now Charlotte has an empire. I hope she’s going to help me a bit with mine.’
When her reign at Vogue Paris ended, she was 56 – too young to retire, but for anyone more conventional, a daunting time to start over, and yes, she was aware of that for a time: ‘Everyone in the industry was looking at me in a different way.’
